Digital Movie Making Can Be Easy

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Blame it on the Grateful Dead and my Miata. If I weren’t such a fan of the high-energy noodlings of the venerable jam-band, and if I hadn’t purchased a new Miata in 1992, I never would have become a media-technology pioneer. That Miata came with head-rest speakers, so you could listen to great music with the top down. Alas, it only included a CD-based music system, which meant my hundreds of Dead tapes were useless.

It was about that time that CD burning first became feasible  although burners were over $500, and blanks $5 to $10 each. Still, I snapped it all up  because the only alternative to live Dead in my car was $30 bootlegs from Italy.

Yup, I mixed, ripped and burned hundreds of CDs before many of today’s iPod owners graduated from diapers. My CDs were legendary, at least among my circle of taper friends. (I even sent a few off to Jerry, but I never heard back.)

Back then, making audio CDs with your computer really pushed the envelope of performance and filled up your hard-drive capacity. Plus the software  version one of EZ CD Creator, among others  was just terrible.

Today, of course, you can make an audio CD with ease, and even store hundreds of them on a single hard drive  in MP3 or uncompressed format. We’ve conquered digital music, but computerized video? It’s in just about the same place audio was back when my Miata was new in 1992.

Although promises abound, getting video into your PC is not as easy as audio today. Just the size of video alone can overwhelm even the brawniest PC. That’s because high quality video typically runs at about 30 images per second  called frames  and each frame takes up about a megabyte of storage. That’s over 1 and a half gigabytes per minute. By contrast, CD-quality audio only takes up about a megabyte a minute.

The good news is that with special mathematical formulas, called compression algorithms, those video signals can be squeezed down  by reducing the size of each frame  to create files 25 to 200 times smaller. This is similar to how the MP3 format compresses CD audio files to a tenth of their size. To get an idea of how compression works, imagine a sponge dinosaur filled with air. Simply squeezing it with your hand removes the air, and makes the dinosaur take up much less space. Just add water again; the dinosaur returns to full size. Compression essentially removes the air  which can then be easily replaced later.

We’re going to focus here on bringing in and editing your own videos  from either a camcorder or on VHS-tape, rather than tackle recording television programs or movies. We’ll leave that task for another day. But if you do want to save a couple of SpongeBob SquarePants clips, the general concepts are the same.

Capturing the Video: Unless you have a digital camcorder, you’ll need a video capture device, which converts those videos into the ones and zeros that your computer understands  this is called digitizing the video. These devices come either as computer boards, which means opening up your PC to install it, or as an external box that connects up via the rectangular USB port on the back. The cards typically deliver better quality, but USB-devices are much easier to install, because you don’t have to crack the case.

Once your capture device is installed, you connect your camcorder or VCR up using either a composite  the round yellow jack that looks like an audio RCA plug  or a four-pin S-Video connector. The software bundled with the capture device should then walk you through digitizing the video.

If you’ve got a digital camcorder, all you’ll need is a cheap FireWire (also known as 1394) port to copy the video to your PC. Because the video is stored digitally, you don’t have to digitize it again. If you don’t have a FireWire port on your PC, you’ll have open it up and install one. Unlike video capture devices, which can cost $100 or more, FireWire boards can be had for as little as $15.

When you bring analog video into your computer, you’ll have to decide how big the video should be. Many capture programs let you select the frame rate, resolution and compression technique. What are these? Resolution, or frame size describes the length and width of the video window  the bigger the window, the better your video, to a point. We recommend encoding at 320×240, rather than the DVD-style 720×480, especially if you are capturing from analog tape. Many PCs can choke on those bigger frames, and modern video-playback technology can expand those frames reasonably well. If you have a high-end PC, though, and 20 or more gigabytes of free hard disk space, then capturing at 720×480 becomes a useful option, especially if you want to make high-quality DVDs.

Frame Rate describes how many pictures, or frames, will be captured (and then played back) per second. 30 frames per second is standard, and anything under 20 is unwatchable. Some capture applications talk about “fields”, which refer to the alternating half frames of interlaced video. Most TVs use interlacing to create a better picture on lower quality sets. With interlacing, half the image is drawn twice as many times  60 times per second with US TV.

And compression remember the dinosaur  describes how that air will be squeezed out of your video frames.

You’ll be presented with a number of options, but to get started, you really need to know just two  MPEG1 and MPEG2 (for more information about these, see our sidebar, which goes into much more detail). You might also run into AVI and MPEG4. AVI is a Microsoft video format, and is also a good choice for computer-only video. MPEG4 is a good choice for streaming, and is now a part of Apple’s Quicktime video format too.

If you’re converting over VCR-tapes, or older analog camcorder tapes the MPEG1 format makes sense, it uses less than a gigabyte of hard disk space for an hour of video. The MPEG2 format is better for higher-quality video, but the files are about 3 times bigger. However, MPEG2 is the native format for DVD movies, so if you’re going to be burning DVDs, capturing in MPEG2 will save you a lengthy conversion step.

If you have a digital video camcorder you can skip all these decisions, because most likely the camera has made them for you.

Video Editing: When it comes to video editing, you have a wide range of choices, from simple software that make good-looking videos out of your home movies to others that let you do just about everything the pros can, including adding flying titles, amazing special effects, smooth dissolves between frames and more. It’s best to start simple, with an easy-to-use package, and then trade up as you become more proficient.

Most video editing programs center around a timeline, drawn across the bottom of your screen. You first cut your digital video up into scenes  birthday candles being blown out, present opening, the inevitable post-party toddler tears. Your editing software typically represents each scene as a single small picture, which you can then drop onto the timeline in any order you wish.

You then add transitions  which tell the software how to shift from one scene to another. Those transitions range from a simple dissolve  where the last frames of a scene fade into the first few frames of the next scene  to wipes, letterboxes and more. It’s fun to experiment, but you can really go overboard.

You can also add titles onto the storyboard, and additional music too. The sky’s the limit, but remember: it’s easy to make a bad movie.You might feel like Spielberg, but you’ll probably end up with The Blair Witch Project.

MP3 really took off when tiny portable players became available  and portable music is also what drew me to burning CDs. Portability is about to come to PC-based video  which should really explode the whole ball of wax.

Archos, one of the first companies to build a hard drive-based MP3 player, will release the first real portable video jukebox later this year. Able to hold 80 hours of MPEG4 video and display it on a nice-sized LCD screen, it’ll revolutionize portable video. Sony’s PSP, due late next year, will combine the Playstation with a video Walkman, in a pocket-sized package. And when that happens, expect manipulating and storing video editing to become as trendy as audio is today  and as big a headache for movie and television producers too. We Deadheads, though, will love it  although I promise not to watch music videos while tootling around town!

Jim Louderback is the Editor-in-Chief for Internet sites at Ziff Davis Media, which runs the popular technology sites PCMag.com and eWeek.com, along with print magazines like PC Magazine, eWEEK, Electronic Gaming Monthly and Computer Gaming World. Jim’s first adventure with computers began with playing Star Trek during high-school on a PDP-11. Since then he’s developed applications and installed networks for many Fortune 500 companies. For the last 12 years he’s been reporting on the technology industry in print, radio, television and the Web.

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